write facts
about a country," she said. She infuses fact with understanding and
imagination. In _Lost Borders_, _The Land of Little Rain_, _The Land of
Journey's Ending_, and _The Flock_ the land itself often seems to speak,
but often she gets in its way. She sees "with an eye made quiet by the
power of harmony." _Earth Horizons_, a stubborn book, is Mary Austin's
inner autobiography. _The Beloved House_, by T. M. Pearce (Caxton,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1940), is an understanding biography.

Joseph Wood Krutch of Columbia University spent a year in Arizona, near
Tucson. Instead of talking about his _The Desert Year_ (Sloane, New
York, 1952), I quote a representative paragraph:

In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of
plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the
spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned,
would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant
against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor
is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if this is, perhaps, one of
the things which makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one
does not find elsewhere. The struggle of living thing against living
thing can be distressing in a way that a mere battle with the elements
is not. If some great clump of cactus dies this summer it will be
because the cactus has grown beyond the capacity of its roots to get
water, not because one green fellow creature has bested it in some
limb-to-limb struggle. In my more familiar East the crowding of the
countryside seems almost to parallel the crowding of the cities. Out
here there is, even in nature, no congestion.

_Southwest_, by Laura Adams Armer (New York, 1935, OP) came from long
living and brooding in desert land. It says something beautiful.

_Talking to the Moon_, by John Joseph Mathews (University of Chicago
Press, 1945) is set in the blackjack country of eastern Oklahoma. This
Oxford scholar of Osage blood built his ranch house around a fireplace,
flanked by shelves of books. His observations are of the outside,
but they are informed by reflections made beside a fire. They are not
bookish at all, but the spirits of great writers mingle with echoes of
coyote wailing and wood-thrush singing.

_Sky Determines: An Interpretation of the Southwest_, by Ross Calvin
(New York, 1934; republished by the University of New Mexico Press)
lives up to its striking